![]() ![]() In the North, the increased repression of southern Black people only fanned the flames of the growing abolitionist movement.įrom the 1830s to the 1860s, the movement to abolish slavery in America gained strength, led by free Black people such as Frederick Douglass and white supporters such as William Lloyd Garrison, founder of the radical newspaper The Liberator, and Harriet Beecher Stowe, who published the bestselling antislavery novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Supporters of slavery pointed to Turner’s rebellion as evidence that Black people were inherently inferior barbarians requiring an institution such as slavery to discipline them, and fears of similar insurrections led many southern states to further strengthen their slave codes in order to limit the education, movement and assembly of enslaved people. Turner’s group, which eventually numbered around 75 Black men, murdered some 55 white people in two days before armed resistance from local white people and the arrival of state militia forces overwhelmed them. The revolt that most terrified enslavers was that led by Nat Turner in Southampton County, Virginia, in August 1831. Rebellions among enslaved people did occur-notably, ones led by Gabriel Prosser in Richmond in 1800 and by Denmark Vesey in Charleston in 1822-but few were successful. Marriages between enslaved men and women had no legal basis, but many did marry and raise large families most owners of enslaved workers encouraged this practice, but nonetheless did not usually hesitate to divide families by sale or removal. A strict hierarchy among the enslaved (from privileged house workers and skilled artisans down to lowly field hands) helped keep them divided and less likely to organize against their masters. Many masters raped enslaved women, and rewarded obedient behavior with favors, while rebellious enslaved people were brutally punished. ![]() They were usually prohibited from learning to read and write, and their behavior and movement were restricted. Landowners sought to make their enslaved completely dependent on them through a system of restrictive codes. Most lived on large plantations or small farms many masters owned fewer than 50 enslaved people. History of SlaveryĮnslaved people in the antebellum South constituted about one-third of the southern population. Though the Union victory freed the nation’s four million enslaved people, the legacy of slavery continued to influence American history, from the Reconstruction to the civil rights movement that emerged a century after emancipation and beyond.Īn escaped enslaved man named Peter showing his scarred back at a medical examination in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, 1863. By the mid-19th century, America’s westward expansion and the abolition movement provoked a great debate over slavery that would tear the nation apart in the bloody Civil War. Throughout the 17th and 18th centuries, people were kidnapped from the continent of Africa, forced into slavery in the American colonies and exploited to work in the production of crops such as tobacco and cotton. Constitution tacitly acknowledged the institution of slavery, counting each enslaved individual as three-fifths of a person for the purposes of taxation and representation in Congress and guaranteeing the right to repossess any “person held to service or labor” (an obvious euphemism for slavery). Some 5,000 Black soldiers and sailors fought on the American side during the Revolutionary War.īut after the Revolutionary War, the new U.S. After the American Revolution, many colonists-particularly in the North, where slavery was relatively unimportant to the agricultural economy-began to link the oppression of enslaved Africans to their own oppression by the British, and to call for slavery’s abolition.ĭid you know? One of the first martyrs to the cause of American patriotism was Crispus Attucks, a former enslaved man who was killed by British soldiers during the Boston Massacre of 1770.
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